The Memoirs of a Survivor (2 page)
Read The Memoirs of a Survivor Online
Authors: Doris Lessing
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Mothers and daughters, #Time Travel, #Modern fiction, #Fiction - General
Coming suddenly into the room a stranger would have to say: ‘That’s a very yellow dog!’ Then: ‘Is it a dog, though?’ What I saw of him, though Emily never did, for he was turned to face her entrance from the moment she crossed the street to come home, was a straw-yellow dog sitting with its back to the room, absolutely still, hour after hour, its whip-tail sticking out through the bars of the chair, all of him expressing a sad and watchful patience. A dog. A dog’s emotions - fidelity, humility, endurance. Seen thus from the back, Hugo aroused the emotions most dogs do: compassion, discomfort, as if for a kind of prisoner or slave. But then he would turn his head and, expecting to see the warm abject lovingness of a dog’s eyes, fellow-feeling vanished away: this was no dog, half humanized. His strong green eyes blazed. Inhuman. Cat’s eyes, a genus foreign to man, not sorry and abject and pleading. Cat’s eyes in a dog’s body - cat’s eyes and face. This beast, whose ugliness drew one’s eyes as good looks do, so that I was always finding myself staring at him, trying to come to terms with him and understand the right he assumed to be there in my life - this
aberration, this freak, kept watch over Emily, and with as much devotion as I did. And it was Hugo who was hugged, caressed, loved when she returned at night smelling of smoke, of drink, and full of the dangerous vitality she had absorbed from the wild company she had been part of for so many hours.
was not at all like the misery that accompanied the ‘personal’ scenes; no, even at the worst, the disorder and anarchy of the rooms were nothing like as bad as the shut-in stuffiness of the family, the ‘personal’; it was always a liberation to step away from my ‘real’ life into this other place, so full of possibilities, of alternatives. When I talk of ‘lowering’ here, I mean only in terms of the generally freer air of this region; I could not compare it with the constrictions and confinements of the place, or the time, where that family lived out its little puppet play.
But what laws, or needs, did the unknown destroyer obey? I would find myself in the long but irregular passage, like a wide hallway that extended itself indefinitely full of doors and little enclaves where a table might stand with flowers or a statue, pictures, objects of all kinds, each with an exact place - and open a door on a room next to it and there everything would be awry. A violent wind would be blowing the curtains straight out into the room, knocking over small tables, sweeping books off the arms of chairs, littering the carpet with ash and cigarette stubs from an ashtray which was wheeling there, ready to topple. Opening another door, everything stood as it ought: there was order, a room not only ready for its occupants, as neat as a hotel bedroom, but one which he, she, they, had just left, for I could feel a personality or presences in a room seen through a half-open door. Which, entering, perhaps only a moment later, I might find in chaos, as if it were a room in a doll’s house, and the hand of the little girl had been inserted through the ceiling and knocked everything over on a freak of impulse or bad temper.
I decided that what I had to do was to repaint the rooms … I talk as if they were a permanent, recognizable, stable set of rooms, as in a house or a flat, instead of a place which changed each time I saw it. First, paint: what was the use of tidying, or cleaning furniture that would have to stand between such forlorn and shabby walls? I found paints. Tins of different sizes and colours stood waiting on spread newspapers on the floor in one of the rooms that was temporarily
empty - I had seen it furnished only a few minutes before. There were brushes and bottles of turpentine and the painter’s ladder I had seen during one of my early visits here. I started on a room I knew well: it was the drawing-room that had brocade curtains and pink and green silks and old wood. I stacked what was usable in the middle of the room under dust-sheets. I scrubbed down the ceiling and walls with sugar soap, with hot water, with detergents. Layer after layer of white paint went on, first dull and flat, then increasingly fine, until the last one covered everything with a clear, softly shining enamel, white as new snow or fine china. It was like standing inside a cleaned-out eggshell; I felt that accretions of grime had been taken off which had been preventing a living thing from breathing. I left the furniture there in the centre of the room under its shrouds, for it seemed too shabby now for such a fine room, and I felt that there seemed little point in setting it out: when I returned the poltergeist would have flung everything about or thrown muck at the walls. But no, it was not so, this did not happen; or I think it did not - for I never saw that room again. And it was not that I looked for it and failed to find it… would it be accurate to say that I forgot it? That would be to talk of that place in terms of our ordinary living. While I was in that room, the task made sense; there was continuity to what I did, a future, and I was in a continuing relation to the invisible destructive creature, or force, just as I was with the other beneficent presence. But this feeling of relatedness, of connection, of context, belonged to that particular visit to the room, and on the next visit it was not the same room, and my preoccupation with it was altered - and so with the other rooms, other scenes, whose flavours and scents held total authenticity for the time they lasted and not a moment longer.
The walls were ruthless; the furniture heavy, polished, shining; sofas and chairs were like large people making conversation; the legs of a great table bruised the carpet.
There were people. Real people, not forces, or presences. Dominant among them was a woman, one I had seen before, knew well. She was tall, large, with a clean-china healthiness, all blue eyes, pink cheeks, and the jolly, no-nonsense mouth of a schoolgirl. Her hair was brown and there was a great deal of it piled on the top of her head and firmly held there. She was dressed for company; she wore good clothes, expensive, fashionable, and inside them her body seemed to be trying to assert itself - timidly, but with a certain courage, even gallantry. Her arms and legs looked uncomfortable; she had not wanted to put on these clothes, but had felt she must: she would discard them with a small laugh, a sigh, and ‘Thank the Lord for that, what a relief!’
She was talking to a woman, the visitor, whose back was to me. I could watch her face, her eyes. Those eyes, unclouded by self-criticism, like skies that have been blue for too many weeks, and will continue blue and regular for weeks yet, for it is nowhere near the time for the season to change - her eyes were blank, did not see the woman she was talking to, nor the small child in her lap, whom she bumped up and down energetically, using her heel as a spring. Nor did she see the little girl who stood a short way from her mother, watching, listening, all her senses stretched, as if every pore took in information in the form of warnings, threats, messages of dislike. From this child emanated strong waves of painful emotion. It was guilt. She was condemned. And, as I recognized this emotion and the group of people there in the heavy, comfortable room, the scene formalized itself like a Victorian problem picture or a
photograph from an old-fashioned play. Over it was written in emphatic script: GUILT.
The child on her knee, two or three years old, a heavy, passive child dressed in white wool that smelled damp, was being jogged faster now; his eyes were glazing as the world bounced up and down around him, his adenoidal mouth was open and slack, the full cheeks quivering.
The husband, passive but really tense with irritation -with guilt - smoked on, listening, frowning.
“But what can you give out when you get nothing in? I am empty, drained; I am exhausted by lunchtime and all I want is to sleep by then. And when you think of what I used to be, what I was capable of! I never thought of being tired, I never imagined I could become the sort of woman who would never have time to open a book. But there it is.’
She sighed, quite unselfconsciously. She was like a child, that tall, solid, confident woman; she needed understanding as a child does. She sat looking inward into the demands of her days and her nights. No one else was there for her, because she felt she was talking to herself: they could not hear, or would not. She was trapped, but did not know why she felt this, for her marriage and her children were what she personally had wanted and had aimed for, and what society had chosen for her. Nothing in her education or experience had prepared her for what she did in fact feel, and she was isolated in her distress and her bafflement, sometimes even believing that she might perhaps be ill in some way.
The little girl, Emily, had left the chair where she had been standing and holding tight to the arm, sheltering from the storm of abuse and criticism. She now went to her father, and stood by his knee, watching that great powerful woman her mother, whose hands were so hurtful. She was shrinking closer and closer to her father who, it seemed, was unaware of her. He made a clumsy movement, knocking off his ashtray, and his instinctive retrieval of it caused his elbow to jog Emily. She fell back, dropped away, like something left behind as a rush of water goes past, or a stream of air. She drifted to the floor and lay there, face downwards, thumb in her mouth.
The hard, accusing voice went on and on, would always go on, had always gone on, nothing could stop it, could stop these emotions, this pain, this guilt at ever having been born at all, born to cause such pain and annoyance and difficulty. The voice would nag on there for ever, could never be turned off, and even when the sound was turned low in memory, there must be a permanent pressure of dislike, resentment. Often in my ordinary life I would hear the sound of a voice, a bitter and low complaint just the other side of sense: there it was, in one of the rooms behind the wall, still there, always there … standing at the window I watched Emily, the bright, attractive girl who always had people around her listening to her chatter, her laugh, her little clevernesses. She was always aware of everything that went on, nothing could escape her in the movements and happenings of that crowd; while talking with one group, it seemed as if even her back and shoulders were taking in information from another. And yet she was isolated, alone; the ‘attractiveness’ was like a shell of bright paint, and from inside it she watched and listened. It was the intensity of her self-awareness that made her alone; this did not leave
her, even at her most feverish, when she was tipsy or drunk, or singing with the others. It was as if she had an invisible deformity, a hump on her back, perhaps visible only to herself … and to me, as I stood watching her in a way I never could when she was close to me at home.
One early evening, she came in at the time when the life outside was at its most lively, its noisiest - that is, just as the lights were beginning to appear at their different heights in the darkening air. She came in and, with a look of trepidation which she was trying to hide from me, she said to Hugo: ‘Come on, come with me and be introduced.’
She had forgotten her earlier experiment? No, of course not; but it seemed to her that things could have changed. She was now well known out there - more, she must feel herself to be a founder-member of this particular tribe: she had helped to form it.
He did not want to go. Oh, no, he very much did not want to go with her. He was laying the responsibility for what might happen on her in the way he stood up, signifying his willingness, or at least his agreement, to go with her.
She led the way out, and he followed. She had not put him on his heavy chain. She was, in leaving her animal unprotected, making her pack responsible for their behaviour.
I watched the young girl, slender and vulnerable even in her thick trousers, her boots, her jacket, her scarves, cross the road, with her beast following soberly after her. She was afraid, that was obvious, as she stood on the edge of one of the bright, chattering, noisy groups which always seemed lit with an inner violence of excitement or of readiness for excitement. She kept her hand down on the beast’s head, for reassurance. People turned and saw her, saw Hugo. Both the girl and the animal had their backs to me; I was able to’ see the throng of faces as Emily and Hugo saw them. I did not like what I saw … if I had been out there I would have wanted to run, to get away … But she stuck it out for a time. Her hand always kept down, close to Hugo’s head, fondling his ears, patting him, soothing, she moved quietly among the clans, determined to make her test, to sound out her position with them. She stayed out with him as dusk came down and the lively crowds were absorbed into a mingle of light and dark, where sound - a laugh, a raised voice, the clink of a bottle - was heightened, and went travelling out in every direction to the now invisible watchers at their windows, carrying messages of excitement or alarm.
When she brought him in she seemed tired. She was saddened. She was much closer to the commonplace level where I, as one of the elderly, lived. Her eyes saw me, as she sat eating her bean salad, her little hunk of bread, seemed really to see the room we sat in. As for me, I was full of apprehension: I believed her sadness was because she had decided her Hugo could not safely travel with the tribe - I thought her mad even to have considered it - and that she had decided to leave with them, to jettison him.
After the meal she sat for a long time at the window. She gazed at the scene she was usually a part of. The animal sat, not beside her, but quietly in a corner. You could believe he was weeping, or would, if he knew how. He sorrowed inwardly. His lids lowered themselves as crises of pain gripped him, and he would give a great shiver.
When Emily went to bed she had to call him several times, and he went at last, slowly, with a quiet, dignified padding. But he was in inner isolation from her: he was protecting himself.
Next morning she offered to go out and forage for supplies. She had not done this for some time, and again I felt this was sort of token apology because she meant to leave.
We two sat on quietly in the long room, where the sunlight had left because it was already midday. I was at one side of it, and Hugo lay stretched, head on paws, along the outer wall of the room where he could not be seen from the windows above him.
We heard footsteps outside which stopped, then became stealthy. We heard voices that had been loud, suddenly soft.
A young girl’s voice? - no, a boy’s; but it was hard to tell. Two heads appeared at the window, trying to see in the comparative dusk of the room: the light was brilliant outside.
It’s here,’ said one of the Mehta boys from upstairs.
‘I’ve seen him at the window,’ said a black youth. I had observed him often with the others on the pavement, a slim, lithe, likeable boy. A third head appeared between the other two: a white girl, from one of the blocks of flats.
‘Stewed dog,’ she said daintily, ‘well
I’m
not going to eat it.’
‘Oh go on,’ said the black boy, ‘I’ve seen what you eat.’
I heard a rattling sound; it was Hugo. He was trembling, and his claws were rattling on the floorboards.
Then the girl saw me sitting there, recognized me, and put on the bright uncaring grin the pack allowed outsiders.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We thought…’
*No,’ I said. ‘I am living here. I haven’t left.’
The three faces briefly turned towards each other, brown, white, black, as they put on for each other’s benefit
we’ve made a mess of it
grimaces. They faded outwards, leaving the window empty.
There was a soft moaning from Hugo.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘They’ve gone.’
The rattling sound increased. Then the animal heaved himself up and crept away, with an attempt at dignity, towards the door into the open kitchen, which was the farthest he could go from the dangerous window. He did not want me to observe his loss of self-possession. He was ashamed of having lost it. The moaning I had heard was as much shame as because he was afraid.
When Emily came in, a good girl, daughter-of-the-house, it was evening. She was tired, had had to visit many places to find supplies. But she was pleased with herself. The rations at that time were minimal, because of the winter, just finished: swedes, potatoes, cabbage, onions. That was about it. But she had managed to find a few eggs, a little fish, and even - a prize - a strongly scented, unshrivelled lemon. I told her, when she had finished showing off her booty, what had happened. At once her good spirits went.
him, bent over him. I could see the big yellow head lying on her arm, could hear him, at last, purr and croon.
It was like a child’s game, giant-sized; only it was not a game, it was serious, important not only to the people actually engaged in this work, but to everyone. Then another person bent with a piece chosen from the multi-coloured heap on the trestles, bent, matched and straightened again to gaze down. There they stood, about a dozen people, quite silent, turning their eyes from the patterns of the carpet to the tangle of stuffs and back again. A recognition, the quick move, a smile of pleasure or of relief, a congratulatory glance from one of the others … there was no competition here, only the soberest and most loving cooperation. I entered the room, I stood on the carpet looking down as they did at its incompleteness, pattern without colour, except where the pieces had already been laid in a match, so that parts of the carpet had a bleak gleam, like one that has been bleached, and other parts glowed up, fulfilled, perfect. I, too, sought for fragments of materials that could bring life to the carpet, and did in fact find one, and bent down to match and fit, before some pressure moved me on again. I realized that everywhere around, in all the other rooms, were people who would in their turn drift in here, see this central activity, find their matching piece - would lay it down, and drift off again to other tasks. I left that tall room whose ceiling vanished upwards into dark where I thought I saw the shine of a star, a room whose lower part was in a bright light that enclosed the silent, concentrated figures like stage lighting. I left them and moved on. The room disappeared. I could not find it when I turned my head to see it again, so as to mark where it was. But I knew it was there waiting, I knew it had not disappeared, and the work in it continued, must continue, would go on always.
This time seems now to have gone on and on, yet in fact it was quite short, a matter of months. So much was happening, and every hour seemed crammed with new experience. Yet in appearance all I did was to live quietly there, in that room, with Hugo, with Emily. Inside it was all chaos … the feeling one is taken over by at the times in one’s life
when everything is in change, movement, destruction - or reconstruction, but that is not always evident at the time - a feeling of helplessness, as if one were being whirled about in a dust-devil or a centrifuge.
I think that all this time, human beings have been watched by creatures whose perceptions and understanding have been so far in advance of anything we have been able to accept, because of our vanity, that we would be appalled if we were able to know, would be humiliated. We have been living with them as blundering, blind, callous, cruel murderers and torturers, and they have watched and known us. And this is the reason we refuse to acknowledge the intelligence of the creatures that surround us: the shock to our
amour propre
would be too much, the judgement we would have to make on ourselves too horrible: it is exactly the same process that can make someone go on and on committing a crime, or a cruelty, knowing it: the stopping and having to see what has been done would be too painful, one cannot face it.
But people need slaves and victims and appendages, and of course many of our ‘pets’ are that because they have been made into what we think they should be, just as human beings can become what they are expected to be. But not all, not by any means; all the time through our lives, we are accompanied, everywhere we go, by creatures who judge us, and who behave at times with a nobility which is… we call it human.
Hugo, this botch of a creature, was in his relations with Emily as delicate as a faithful lover who is content with very little provided he is not banished from the beloved presence. This is what he had imposed on himself: he would not make demands, not ask, not be a nuisance. He was waiting. As I was. He watched, as I did.
I was spending long hours with him. Or I sat at the times when the sunlight was on the wall, waiting for it to open, to unfold. Or I went about the streets, taking in news and rumours and information with the rest, wondering what to do for the best, and deciding to do nothing for the time being; wondering how long this city would stand, eroded as it was in every way, its services going and gone, its people fleeing, its food supplies worsening, its law and order consisting more and more of what the citizens imposed on themselves, an instinctive self-restraint, even a caring for others who were in the same straits.
There seemed to be a new sharpness in the tension of waiting. For one thing, the weather - the summer had come hot and dry, the sun had a dusty look. The pavement opposite my window had filled up again. But there was less interest now in what went on out there: the windows held fewer heads, people had become used to it all. Everyone knew that again and again the street’s edge would half-empty as another tribe took off, and we acknowledged with mixed feelings the chance that had chosen our street as a gathering place for the migrations from our part of the city: parents at least knew what their children were doing, even if they did not like it. We became accustomed to watching a mixed lot of people collect along the pavement with their pathetic bits of baggage, and then depart, singing their old wartime songs, or revolutionary songs that seemed as inappropriate as sex songs are to old age. And Emily did not leave. She would run after them a little way with some of the other girls, and then come home, subdued, to put her arms around her Hugo, her dark head down on his yellow coat. It was as if they both wept. They huddled together, creatures in sorrow, comforting each other.
The next thing was that Emily fell in love … I am conscious that this seems a term inappropriate to the times I am describing. It was with a young man who seemed likely to lead the next contingent out and away from the city. He was, despite his swashbuckling clothes, a thoughtful young man, or at least one slow to judgement; an observer by temperament, perhaps, but pushed into action by the time? He was, at any rate, the natural guardian of the younger ones, the distressed, the forlorn. He was known for this, teased for it. sometimes criticized: softness of this sort was superfluous to the demands of survival. Perhaps this was why he appealed to Emily.
I believe her trust in him was such that she even thought of taking Hugo out to the mob for another trial, but this must have gone from her to Hugo, for he felt it: he shivered and shrank, and she had to put her arms around him, and say: ‘No, I won’t, Hugo, I promise I won’t. Did you hear? -I promised, didn’t I?’
Well, then, so there it was, she was infatuated. It was ‘the first love’ of tradition. Which is to say that half a dozen puppy loves, each one as agonizing and every bit as intense and serious as later ‘adult’ loves, had passed; this love was ‘first’ and ‘serious’ because it was returned, or at least acknowledged.
I remember I used to wonder if these young people, living as they had to from hand to mouth, who would never shut themselves off in couples behind walls unless it was for a few days or hours in a deserted house somewhere, or a shed in a field, would ever say to each other:
I
love you. Do you love me? Will our love, last?
- and so on. All of which phrases seemed more and more like the keys or documents of possession to states and conditions now obsolete.
But Emily was suffering, she was in pain, as one is at that age, as fresh as a new loaf and loving a hero of twenty-two. Who had inexplicably, even eerily, chosen her. She was his girl, chosen from many, and known as such. She was beside him on the pavement, went with him on expeditions, and people felt pleasure and even importance when they called to her: ‘Gerald says…’ ‘Gerald wants you to…’
From pain she would soar at once to exaltation, and stood there beside him, flushed and beautiful, her eyes soft. Or fling herself down in the sofa-corner, to be by herself for a bit, or at least away from him, for it was all too much, too powerful, she needed a respite. She was radiant with amazement, not seeing me or her surroundings, and I knew she was saying to herself: But he’s chosen
me, me
..
. and this did not mean
And I’m only thirteen!
That was a thought for people my age. A girl was ready for mating when her body was.
But these young people’s lives were communal, and mating was far from being the focus or pivot of a relationship when they chose each other. No, any individual consummations were nothing beside this act of mingling
constantly with others, as if some giant rite of eating were taking place, everyone tasting and licking and regurgitating everyone else, making themselves known to others and others known to them in this tasting and sampling - eyeing each other, rubbing shoulders and bodies, talking, exchanging emanations.
her
tribe … And this was why she had so often to slip away indoors, to creep near her familiar Hugo, and put her arms around him. At which he might give a muffled groan, since he knew very well the use she was making of him.
of her day, the demands of Emily. The child wore a
long nightie, with frills at wrists and at the neck. Her hair had been brushed and was held by ribbon. A few minutes ago she had been a clean, neat, pretty little girl in a white nightdress, with a white ribbon in her hair, but now she was hot and sweating, and her body was contorting and twisting to escape the man’s great hands that squeezed and dug into her ribs, to escape the great cruel face that bent so close over her with its look of private satisfaction. The room seemed filled with a hot anguish, the fear of being held tight there, the need for being held and tortured, since this was how she pleased her captors. She shrieked: ‘No, no, no, no’… helpless, being explored and laid bare by this man.
The mother was indifferent. She did not know what was going on, or what the little girl suffered. For it was a ‘game’ and the squeals and protests were from her own childhood and therefore in order, healthy, licensed. From her came a blankness, the indifference of ignorance. She cooed and talked to her stolid open-mouthed infant while the father went on with his task, from time to time looking at his wife with a wonderfully complex expression - guilt, but he was unaware of that; appeal, because he felt this was wrong and ought to be stopped; astonishment that it was allowable and by her, who not only did not protest, but actively encouraged him in the ‘game’; and, mingled with all these, a look that was never far from his face at any time, of sheer incredulity at the impossibility of everything. He let his knees go slack, and pretended to release the child, who nearly fell, reached for a knee to steady herself, but before she could run away was caught again as the knees clapped together on either side of her. The exquisite torture began again. ‘There, there, there, Emily,’ muttered the great man, flooding her in an odour of tobacco and unwashed clothes. •Now then, that’s it, there you are, you see,’ he went on, as the fingers thicker than any of her ribs dug into her sides and she screamed and pleaded.
This scene faded like a spark or like a nightmare, and the same man was sitting in the same room but in a chair near the bed. He wore a heavy brown dressing gown of some very thick rough wool, a soldier’s garment, and he smoked and sat watching his wife. The large healthy woman was discarding her clothes in a rapid, efficient way on her side of the bed near the fire: only now it was summer, and the fireplace had red flowers standing in it. The curtains hung limp and still, very white, but drawn back to show areas of black glass which reflected the man, the room, the movements of the woman. She was unaware of her husband, who sat there watching her nakedness emerge. She was talking, she was creating her day for him, for herself: ‘And by four o’clock I was quite exhausted, the girl had her half-day, and Baby was awake all morning, he did not have his sleep, and Emily was very trying and demanding today … and… and …’ The plaint went on, while she stood naked, looking about her for pyjamas. She was a fine, solid woman with clear white flesh, her breasts small and round. The nipples were virginal for a woman who had had two children: small and with narrow pink aureoles. Her plentiful brown hair fell down her back, and she scratched first her scalp, then under one arm, lifting it to expose wisps of long brown hair. On to her face came a look of intense satisfaction which would have appalled her if she could have seen it. She scratched the other armpit, then allowed herself to scratch, voluptuously, with both hands, her ribs, her hips, her stomach. Her hands did not stray lower. She stood there scratching vigorously for a long time, a couple of minutes, while red marks appeared on the solid white flesh behind the energetic fingers, and from time to time she gave a great shudder of pleasure, masked as cold. Her husband sat quiet and watched. On his face was a small smile. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and took a deep lungful, and slowly let it out, allowing it to trickle from half-open mouth and nostrils.
His wife had finished with her scratching, and was bundling herself into pink-spotted cotton pyjamas, in which she looked like a jolly schoolgirl. Her face was unconsciously greedy - for sleep. She was already in imagination drifting
to oblivion. She got efficiently into bed, as if her husband did not exist, and in one movement lay down and turned her back to him. She yawned. Then she remembered him: there was something she ought to do before allowing herself this supreme pleasure. She turned over and said, ‘Goodnight, old thing,’ and was at once sucked down and lay asleep, facing him. He sat on, smoking, now openly examining her at his leisure. The amusement was there, incredulity, and, at the same time, an austerity that had begun, from the look of it, as a variety of moral exhaustion, even a lack of vitality, and had long ago become a judgement on himself and on others.
out of the nursery without looking again at the two cots, where the little boy lay silent, his mouth open, but where the girl was tossing and struggling to get out, to get out, to get out.
woman was so puzzled by it all. She suffered the small hot arms for a little, but then she could not help herself - her dislike of flesh raised her own hands, to put the child’s arms away from her. ‘There, that’s enough,’ she said. But she stayed, a little. Duty made her stay. Duty to what? Sickness, very likely. ‘A sick child needs its mother.’ Something of that sort. Between the little girl’s hot, needful, yearning body, which wanted to be quieted with a caress, with warmth, wanted to lie near a large, strong wall of a body, a safe body which would not tickle and torment and squeeze; wanted safety and assurance - between her and
the
mother’s regularly breathing, calm body, all self-sufficiency and duty, was a blankness, an unawareness; there was no contact, no mutual comfort.
The little girl lay back and then reached for the glass and drank eagerly. The moment the glass was empty the mother got up and said: I’ll make you another one.’
‘Oh stay with me, stay with me.’
I can’t, Emily. You are being difficult again.’
Can Daddy come?’
‘But he’s busy.’
‘Can’t he read to me?’
‘You can read to yourself now, you’re a big girl.’
The woman went out with the empty glass. The girl took a half-eaten biscuit from under the pillow and picked up a book and read and ate, ate and read, her limbs always on the move, tossing and rearranging themselves, her unoccupied hand touching her cheek, her hair, her shoulders, feeling her flesh everywhere, lower and lower down, near to her cunt, her ‘private parts’ - but from there the hand was quickly withdrawn, as if that area had barbed wire around it. Then she stroked her thighs, crossed and uncrossed them, moved and twisted and read and ate and ate and read.
There lay Emily now on my living-room floor.
‘Dear Hugo … dear, dear Hugo - you are
my
Hugo, you are my love, Hugo …’
And I was filled with that ridiculous impatience, the helplessness, of the adult who watches a young thing growing. There she was enclosed in her age, but in a continuum with those scenes behind the wall, a hinterland which had formed her - yet she could not see them or know about them, and it would be of no use my telling her: if I did she would hear words, no more. From that shadowy region behind her came the dictate:
You are this, and this and this
-
this is what you have to be, and not that
;
and the biological demands of her age took a precise and predictable and clock-like stake on her life, making her exactly like this and that. And so it would go on, it had to go on, and I must watch; and in due time she would fill like a container with substances and experiences; she would be delivered by these midwives, some recognizable, understood, and common to everyone, some to be deduced only from their methods of operation - she would become mature, that ideal condition envisaged as the justification of all previous experience, an apex of achievement, inevitable and peculiar to her. This apex is how we see things, it is a biological summit we see: growth, the achievement on the top of the curve of her existence as an animal, then a falling away towards death. Nonsense of course, absurd; but it was hard to subdue in myself this view of her, shut off impatience as I watched her rolling and snuggling beside her purring yellow beast, to make myself acknowledge that this stage of her life was every bit as valid as the one ahead of her - perhaps to be summed up or encapsulated in the image of a capable but serene smile - and that what I was really waiting for (just as, somewhere inside herself,
she
must be) was the moment she would step off this merry-go-round, this escalator carrying her from the dark into the dark. Step off it entirely …
And then?
There was a new development in the life on the pavement. It was bound up with Gerald; with, precisely, his need to protect the weak, his identification with them, that quality which could not be included in the little balance sheets of survival. There were suddenly children out there, nine, ten,
eleven years old, not attached to families, but by themselves. Some had parents they had run away from, or whom they did see, but only occasionally. Some had no parents at all. What had happened to them? It was hard to say. Officially of course children still had parents and homes and that kind of thing, and if not, they had to be in care or custody; officially children even went to school regularly. But nothing like this was the practice. Sometimes children attached themselves to other families, their own parents being unable to cope with the pressures, not knowing where to find food and supplies, or simply losing interest and throwing them out to fend for themselves as people had once done with dogs and cats that no longer gave pleasure. Some parents were dead, because of violence, or epidemics. Others had gone away out of the city and left their children behind. These waifs tended to be ignored by the authorities unless attention was specifically drawn to them, but people might feed them or take them into their own homes. They were still part of society, wished to be part, and hung around where people lived! They were quite unlike those children whom I will have to describe quite soon, who put themselves outside society altogether, were our enemies.
from us, from Hugo and me. There
we
were, the two of us, waiting. Waiting was our occupation. We kept each other company. But he was not mine, not my animal, most definitely he was not that. He waited, listening, for Emily: his green eyes steady and watchful. He was always ready to get up and meet her at the door - I knew she was coming minutes before she appeared, for he smelled or heard or intuited her presence when she was still streets away. At the door the two pairs of eyes, the green, the brown, engaged in a dazzling beam of emotion. Then she embraced him, fed him, and bathed. There were no baths or showers in Gerald’s community yet. She dressed herself and at once went out to the pavement.
This period, too, seemed to go on interminably. That summer was a long one, the weather the same day after day. It was hot, stuffy, noisy, dusty. Emily, like the other girls, had reverted with the hot weather to earlier styles of dress, shedding the thick garments that had to be worn for utility. She pulled out the old sewing machine again and made herself some bright fanciful dresses out of old clothes from the stalls, or she wore the old dresses themselves. Very strange those pavements looked, to someone my age, with decades of different fashions on display there all at the same time, obliterating that sequence of memory which goes: ‘That was the year when we wore…’
Every day, from early afternoon onwards, Gerald, with the children from the community house, would be on the pavement, so Emily was separated from her ‘family’ only for a couple of hours each day when she paid her visit home to dress and bath, and for an hour or so each evening, when she took a meal with me. Or rather, with Hugo. I think, too, that coming home for this brief time was a necessity to her emotionally: she needed a respite from her emotions, her happiness. In that other house it was all a great crescendo of joy, of success, of fulfilment, of doing, of making, of being needed. She would return from it like someone running in laughing from a heavy storm, or from too-loud band music. She would alight on my sofa smiling, poised ready for
flight, basking, friendly to the whole world. She could not prevent herself smiling all the time, wherever she was, so that people kept looking at her, then came to talk to her, touch her, share in the vitality that flowed off her, making a pool or reservoir of life. And in that radiant face we could still see the incredulous: But why
me
?
This happening to
me
!
flowers of the old world, I saw how extensive was this place, with no boundaries or end that I could find, much larger than I had ever understood. Long ago, when it had stood up thick and strong, a protection from the forest and from the weather, how very many must have lived here, multitudes, yet all had been subdued to the one Presence who was the air they breathed - though they did not know it, was the Whole they were minuscule parts of, their living and their dying as little their personal choice or wanting as the fates and fortunes of molecules in a leaf are theirs.
What happened next was June.
One afternoon, when Emily had been home with me and Hugo a full day and a night, had not gone at all to the communal household, a little girl came to the door asking for her. I say ‘a little girl’ conscious of the absurdity of the phrase with its associations of freshness and promise. But after all, she was one: a very thin child, with strong prominent bones. Her eyes were pale blue. She had pale hair that looked dirty hanging to her shoulders and half hiding an appealing little face. She was small for her age, could have been eight or nine, but was in fact eleven. In other words she was two years younger than Emily, who was a young woman and loved - precariously - by the king, Gerald. But her breasts were stubby little points, and her body altogether in the chrysalis stage.
‘Where is Emily?’ she demanded. Her voice - but I shall only say that it was at the extreme away from ‘good English’, the norm once used for announcements, news, or by officialdom. I could hardly understand her, her accent was so degraded. I am not talking about the words she used, which were always sharp enough when one had uncoded them, were stubborn and strong attempts to lay hold of meanings and ideas every bit as clear and good as those expressed in tutored speech. The peremptoriness of the ‘Where is Emily?’ was not from rudeness; but because of the effort she had to put into it, the determination to be understood and to be led to Emily, or that Emily should be brought out to her. It was, too, because she was a person who had not been brought up to believe she had rights. Yet she set herself towards goals, she wanted things and achieved them: she would reach her Emily without the help of words, skills, manners - without rights.
‘She’s here,’ I said. ‘And please come in.’
She followed me, stiff with the determination that had got her here. Her eyes were everywhere, and the thought came into my mind that she was pricing what she saw. Or, rather, valuing, since ‘pricing’ was somewhat out of date.
When she saw Emily, today a languid, suffering young woman on a chair by the window, her two bare feet set side by side on her attendant yellow beast, the child’s face lit with a heartbreakingly sweet smile all confidence and love, and she ran forward, forgetting herself. And Emily, seeing her, smiled and forgot her troubles - love-troubles and goodness knows what else, and the two girls went into the tiny room that was Emily’s. Two girls in a young girls’ friendship, despite one being already a woman, and one still a child, with a child’s face and body. But not, as I discovered, with a child’s imaginings, for she was in love with Gerald. And, after having suffered jealousy because of the favourite Emily, by turns hating and denigrating her or feverishly and slavishly admiring her, now she was her sister in sorrow when Gerald was being loved, served, by another girl, or girls.
It was morning when she came; and at lunchtime the two emerged from the bedroom and Emily asked with her unfailing visitor’s manners: ‘If you don’t mind, I would like to ask June to have a sandwich or something.’
Later in the day the two tired of the stuffy room, and came into the living-room, and sat on the floor on either side of Hugo and talked while they patted and petted him. June was wanting advice and information on all kinds of practical matters, and particularly about the garden, which was Emily’s responsibility, since Emily understood about all that kind of thing.
She did?
I
knew nothing of this in Emily, who with me had not showed the slightest interest in such matters, not even in the potted plants.
I sat listening to their talk, reconstructing from it the life of their community … how very odd it was that all over our cities, side by side with citizens who still used electric light, drew water for which they had paid from taps, expected
their rubbish to be collected, were these houses which were as if the technological revolution had never occurred at all. The big house fifteen minutes’ walk away had been an old people’s home. It had large grounds. Shrubs and flowerbeds had been cleared and now there were only vegetables. There was even a little shed in which a few fowls were kept - another illegality that went on everywhere, and to which the authorities turned a blind eye. The household bought -or acquired in some way - flour, dried legumes, honey. But they were about to get a hive of bees. They also bought the substitutes ‘chicken’ and ‘beef and ‘lamb’ and concocted the usual unappetizing meals with them. Unappetizing only to some: there were plenty of young people who had eaten nothing else in their lives, and who now preferred the substitute to the real thing. As I’ve said, we learn to like what we get.
barbarism took hold and spread. At first the observers were all sharp hostility and fear. They made the sounds of disapproval, of rectitude, but they were in fact learning as they, the still fortunate, watched these savages from whose every finger sprouted new skills and talents. In some parts of the city whole suburbs had reverted. Miles of people, all growing their potatoes and onions and carrots and cabbages and setting guard on them day and night, raising chickens and ducks, making their sewage into compost, buying or selling water, using empty rooms or an empty house to breed rabbits or even a pig - people no longer in neat little families, but huddled together in groups and clans whose structure evolved under the pressures of necessity. At night such an area withdrew itself into a dangerous obscurity where no one dared go, with its spare or absent street lighting, its potholed pavements and rutted streets, the windows showing the minuscule flickering of candles or the shallow glow of some improvised light on a wall or a ceiling. Even in the daytime, to walk there seeing wary faces half visible behind shutters, knowing that bows and arrows, catapults, or even guns were held trained for use on you if you transgressed -such an expedition was like a foray into enemy territory, or into the past of the human race.
Talked
.
The bureaucracy. An international bureaucracy. But when has it not been true? - that the section of a society which gets the most out of it maintains in itself, and for as long as it can in others, an illusion of security, permanence, order.
is
felt by most people, somewhere, or at least occasionally) that some people do well
while others starve and fail. This is the most powerful of mechanisms for, to begin with, the maintaining of a society, and then its undermining, its rotting, its collapse … yes, of course this is riot new, has been going on throughout history, very likely and as far as we know. Has there been a rime in our country when the ruling class was not living inside its glass bell of respectability or of wealth, shutting its eyes to what went on outside? Could there be any real difference when this ‘ruling class’ used words like justice, fair play, equity, order, or even socialism? - used them, might even have believed in them, or believed in them for a time; but meanwhile everything fell to pieces while still, as always, the administrators lived cushioned against the worst, trying to talk away, wish away, legislate away, the worst - for to admit that it was happening was to admit themselves useless, admit the extra security they enjoyed was theft and not payment for services rendered …
And yet in a way everybody played a part in this conspiracy that nothing much was happening - or that it was happening, but one day things would go in reverse and hey presto! back we would be in the good old days. Which, though? That was a matter of temperament: if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies. I fancied a rather elegant sort of feudalism - without wars, of course, or injustice. Emily, having never experienced or suffered it, would have liked the Age of Affluence back again.
I played the game of complicity like everyone else. I renewed my lease during this period and it was for seven years: of course I knew that we didn’t have anything like that time left. I remember a discussion with Emily and June about replacing our curtains. Emily wanted some muslin curtains in yellow that she had seen in some exchange-shop. I argued in favour of a thicker material, to keep out noise. June agreed with Emily: muslin, if properly lined - and there was a stall that sold nothing but old lining materials only two miles away - hung well, and was warm. After all, thicker material, supposedly warmer, hung so
stiffly that draughts could get in around the edges … yes, but once this thick material had been washed, it would lose its stiffness:… this was the sort of conversation we were all capable of having; we might spend days or weeks on a decision. Real decisions, necessary ones, such as that electricity would have to be given up altogether, were likely to be made with a minimum of discussion; they were forced on us - it was that summer that I arranged for my electricity to be disconnected. Just before June’s visit, in fact. Her first visit: soon she was coming every day, and usually found us in discussions about lighting and heating. She told us that there was a man in a small town about twelve miles away selling devices of the sort once used for camping. No, they were not the same devices, but he had evolved all kinds of new ones: she had seen some, we should get them too. She and Emily discussed it, decided not to make the expedition by themselves, and asked Gerald to go with them. Off they went and came back late one afternoon loaded with every kind of gadget and trick for light and heat. And here was Gerald, in my living-room. From near by this young chieftain was not so formidable; he seemed harassed, he was even forlorn - his continual glances towards Emily had anxiety in them, and he spent all the time he was there asking her for advice about this or about that… she gave it, she was really extraordinarily practical and sensible. I was seeing something of their relationship - I mean, the one beneath that other perhaps less powerful bond which was evident and on the surface, and to which Emily was responding: beyond this almost conventional business of girl in love with boss of the gang, one saw a very young man, overburdened and over-responsible and unsure, asking for support, even tenderness. He had gone off with Emily and June to ‘help carry supplies in for Emily and her friend for the winter’, but this was not only kind-heartedness - he had plenty of that - but a way of saying to Emily that he needed her back in bis household. A payment, perhaps; a bribe, if you want to be cynical. She was dallying with going back. Robustly tired after the long walk
carrying such a load, looking flushed and sunburned and pretty, she coquetted with him, made herself scarce and difficult. As for June, not yet able to play this game, she was quiet, watching, very much excluded. Emily, feeling power over Gerald, was using it; she stretched, and luxuriated in her body, and played with Hugo’s head and ears and smiled at Gerald … yes, she would go back with him to his house, since he so much wanted it, wanted
her
.
And after an hour or so of it, off they went, the three of them, Emily and Gerald first, June tagging on behind. Parents and a child was what it looked like - and what it felt like, I guessed, at least to June.
And now I suppose it must be asked and answered why Emily did not choose to be a chieftainess, a leader on her own account? Well, why not? Yes, I did ask myself this, of course. The attitudes of women towards themselves and to men, the standards women had set up for themselves, the gallantry of their fight for equality, the decades-long and very painful questioning of their roles, their functions - all this makes it difficult for me now to say, simply, that Emily was in love. Why did she not have her own band, her own houseful of brave foragers and pilferers, of makers and bakers and growers of their own food? Why was it not she of whom it was said: ‘There was that house, it was standing empty, Emily has got a gang together and they’ve moved in. Yes, it’s very good there, let’s see if she will let us come too.’
There was nothing to stop her. No law, written or unwritten, said she should not, and her capacities and talents were every bit as varied as Gerald’s or anybody else’s. But she did not. I don’t think it occurred to her.
The trouble was, she did love Gerald; and this longing for him, for his attention and his notice, the need to be the one who sustained and comforted him, who connected him with the earth, who held him steady in her common sense and her warmth - this need drained her of the initiative she would need to be a leader of a commune. She wanted no
more than to be the leader of the commune’s woman. His only woman, of course.
